See likes

Your posts liked by others

Re: What is happening mates
our primary disk got corrupted, had to reload the OS and restore from a backup. everything should be good to go, mostly back to normal.. please do let us know if anything isn't working
July 15, 2017, 11:14:59 AM HST

"no autoclimb" AoS event by oldtimer tGM this Friday, Oct. 20th, 2017
there once was a time when the early versions of Ace of Spades didn't have autoclimb, the feature that automatically and quickly walks you over single-height blocks. back then, Ace of Spades was a slower paced game, and tunnels had a significant impact on gameplay. that was the style of AoS i initially discovered and quickly fell in love with. of course, AoS is still fun with autoclimb - in a different way - because that subtle change greatly affected its gameplay.

anyway, this Friday, October 20, 2017, veteran player and former AoS community assistant TheGrandmaster will be hosting an event using an earlier version of AoS that doesn't have autoclimb and the SMG weapon. whether for nostalgia or curiosity, now's your chance to (re)experience a piece of that era. here's tGM's post on Build and Shoot about it:

Quote from: TheGrandmaster

Y'all probably remember me, but in-case you don't - began playing AoS @ v0.22 and played it for many years, involved in various parts of the community. Been away for quite some time and I'd still call myself somewhat aloof from BnS, but I have been busy!

I help run a Rocket League community, who have begun having several weekly streams. We're called Division6, and every Friday we host an Alternative Games Night (AGN) @ 7pm BST. Last week I convinced 10 newbies to play Soldat (props to you if you know that game), and this week I am aiming to fill a 32-slot server from one of the earlier AoS versions.

Gen map, crazy sensitivity, no auto-climb, just the pure gold fun that was the early days.I'm hoping to attract a crowd and get a full server so we can properly get a taste of that feeling, so please tell your old buddies to come back along for a nostalgic wonderland.

The client download will be linked to at the very beginning of the Stream, will have an easy 1-click joinable batch file, and the game shall be streamed by me on the D6 twitch channel (http://twitch.division6.org) for a number of hours hopefully (the server will be kept up for the night regardless).

Hope to see you all there, and if you have any questions, shoot!

EDIT: Here's the download link in advance for all those curious!It's a modded 0.52, with autoclimb taken out, frame rate cap upped to 60 FPS, and master server link removed.http://aos.division6.org/SERVER LINK WILL BE PROVIDED ON THE NIGHT

Honestly allowing anyone with an aloha.pk acount to use a vpn is not a bad idea.It would be most efficient if a unique e-mail would be required to create a new acount as well(cant use same email twice) so even if one does take the "ill just create a bunch of acounts to evade" aproach creating a bunch of emails will get abnoxious after a while.Not sure if a unique email is required to create an account already but if thats the case, then we've got a headstart i suppose.Allowing only trusted players to use vpns however may be too extreme of a countermeasure and it may reduce playerbase by a significant amount.

unique emails are already required, and there are other anti spam measures already in place that add difficulty to the registration process.. and there are other steps we could take to add even more hurdles. but even without all those registration difficulties, creating a forum account is still a much bigger hassle than simply changing VPN connections

i know you're not asking if this is literally our job, but i just want to point out that we do this out of our goodwill. we don't get paid for it, we volunteer. in fact, we even contribute our own money to keep things operational. we put in a lot of effort to try to keep things as smooth as possible for the majority because we want you to enjoy the experience so that we can also enjoy it. it's not fun for us when someone is upset.

Because I don't see Aloha servers suffering from hackers; as I said before, the admins do a pretty swift job in getting rid of any disturbances in games already.

i agree that our admins are incredible at taking care of disturbances. just because you don't see that happening doesn't mean it's magically easy. i don't expect you believe me, but there's so much more effort going into maintaining all of this than you're imagining.

Players have always used ways to evade bans... So what have you been doing for the past 5 years to combat that? What has suddenly made those methods now really difficult, to the point where we now need to suggest curbing ordinary player's access to VPN as a consequence? Because, again, I don't see this 'problem' spilling into the server affecting everyone playing. I'm all for making things easier, but not at the cost of a large portion of players being inconvenienced in accessing the server, or in some cases being unable to join.

So just like my first post, I am suggesting asking whether this really is a problem. I'm not interested in increasing or decreasing staff numbers, the great looming problem (actual problem) of lack of players is more interesting to me however.

again, a lot more than you're imagining... for 6 years, not 5, actually. that's not suddenly.

again, please consider that maybe the reason you don't see the problem is because our efforts have been so focused on providing you that luxury.

what we're trying to do is improve the efficiency of our efforts so that we can continue helping the majority of players have a normal experience. your claim that a "large portion of players would be inconvenienced" is quite exaggerated because the truth of the matter is that only a very small portion of players use VPNs and we're already thinking about ways to make it as easy as possible for them to continue playing.

considering that lack of players is such a concern to you, you should be grateful that we're proactively taking steps to curb VPN abuse.
October 25, 2017, 12:48:51 AM HST

I thought Aloha already kicked VPN users, I recall seeing several kicks from "using proxy" or some such.

yes, currently a small list of VPN providers aren't allowed, but we want to change it so that all VPN providers are allowed with slightly increased use difficulty, which would add significant hurdles for abusers.

just that it's a little annoying and inconvenient for staff, is that right?

it's not "just a little annoying and inconvenient" because some evaders have nothing better to do with their lives than troll around all day... talk about wasting their own youth! anyway, imagine you're at a party and there's a mosquito that consistently buzzes in everyone's ears, or a fly that consistently lands on everyone's food. now imagine that mosquito and fly are a thousand times their normal sizes and aggressively attacking everyone's fun to the point that it's not fun anymore. well, still "fun" for the evader, but everyone else will leave if we do nothing. sure we could continue consuming our efforts to shoo him away every few seconds, but currently he has the easier advantage. can you see my point yet? good, because we're essentially proposing the use of a bug zapper to more precisely target him and stop him dead in his tracks without everyone else knowing what hit him.

I have ran enough servers, forums and communities across platforms to understand the basic effort that goes into maintaining things smoothly.

as have i since 1996 or i'm pretty sure before that, i don't really remember exactly. various communities on varying platforms for various interests. all of which weren't nearly as taxing as AoS players are. love you though, AoS players!

But, I do know if you did go through with this suggestion you would see a negative affect on the player count - because I'm not talking about a handful of players here, I'm talking about enough players to consistently show an affect; which is why I said "large portion".

how can you be so sure? you're only assuming. your understanding of our plan isn't even accurate anyway. the server wouldn't kick them for using a VPN -- it would disable their building and weapons then spam their chat to inform them that they need to be logged in to build and shoot, no pun intended. we've already thought about translated localization for those messages as well.

Because luckily for you and I, Izzy, living in our lovely western civilizations, we don't feel the need to have to use VPN. With governments in various countries in South America and East Asia, a lot of user feel they need to use such things for their own safety.

assuming again. i've been living in Southeast Asia the past few years and i'm still here now. i use a VPN myself to improve my routing/lower my ping. however, as i've tried to explain before, our logs show that the vast majority of players don't use VPNs. those who do are the minority, and (i'm repeating myself) our plan already includes options specially for them, so how can you say we'd be disregarding them?

I think fundamentally everyone should have access to VPNs without being forced to create or login to an Aloha account.

are you forgetting that most games these days require some kind of central login/verification for all connections, not just VPNs? AoS is one of the few games that doesn't require any of that for its main playerbase. it's too open for its own good. we're not trying to change that, though! we're only trying to make it more difficult for VPNs to be abused.
October 26, 2017, 04:23:12 PM HST

i mentioned that i wanted to unmute you and see how you went a few weeks ago, and the majority who have weighed in so far have wanted to keep you muted until february because they don't think you can control yourself. can you? if you think you can i'm not against trying it out for a while, but i won't oppose anyone who wants to reinstate the automute if they think you've gone back to being a massive pain again

he was willing to give you another chance, he asked if you could try...

you ignored the question.

you got defensive.

you pointed fingers.

you name-called.

how is any of that helpful to you?

don't you know topo actually wanted to unmute you? all you had to do was provide a little reassurance, but you threw your opportunity away!

you're too concerned about proving yourself. sometimes it's best to just let it go...
October 31, 2017, 07:13:46 AM HST